Short and Sharp: What if you're wrong?

If you are familiar with the evangelical style of Ray Comfort and Kurt Cameron, then you will be familiar with the question “what if you’re wrong?”. For those of you who are not, it is a tactic that attempts to highlight in the minds of atheists the repercussions if they are wrong about the existence of the god that Comfort and Cameron believe in (i.e. that the atheist will go to Hell). I have seen many refutations of this argument (which is essentially Pascal’s Wager), however, I am going to actually do the opposite; I think it is a valid question in certain contexts and should be answerable by any person about any belief that they hold.

To demonstrate why I think this is the case, I would like to modify a scenario used by Richard Carrier in his book, Sense and Goodness Without God;  

Suppose a friend told you they had purchased a new car, would you believe them? As this is a fairly unremarkable claim (many people own cars), it would require very little evidence for you to believe them, perhaps even just their word alone. However, suppose now that you were relying on this friend to drive you to a very important meeting. Would you be willing to rely on just their word or would you require more evidence now that the claim has the potential to impact upon your life? If you believe them, and they are wrong (either by lying or just being misinformed; say they thought the car would be ready for their use on that day, but it was delayed), you are now stuck without a way to get your meeting.

The point that I am trying to drive at is that the amount of evidence needed to support a claim is not simply just how ordinary or extraordinary the claim is, but also how much of an impact the claim’s truth or falseness will have. Claims that will have very little effects require less evidence than claims that will have profound effect, all other things being equal. The way in which Comfort and Cameron use this question is still wrong; in that, they are essentially throwing in a possibility, Hell, which has such a low probability of actually existing that it isn’t worth considering. As such, the question is only valid when used in the context of known negative outcomes. However, when used in this way, it is very useful at highlighting how effects can impact upon our evidential standards.

'Ethical' Egoists

While watching the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy recently, I was reminded of my general distain for ‘ethical’ egoists. These are people who believe it is okay to do what is in the best interests for themselves and their in-group (family, friends, lovers etc.), even if it leads to the otherwise preventable harm of others. As such, it is kind of a very shallow version of ethical egoism; the branch of moral philosophy that says that moral agents should act in their own self-interest. While the actual theory is a lot more detailed than my one sentence summary indicates, I still believe it has problems.

To demonstrate my problem with ‘ethical’ egoists, I’ll explain the scenario that occurred in the episode. Earlier in the season, Meredith had switched a placebo for an active drug in an Alzheimer’s clinical trial she was a part of. This was due to the fact that the patient who was to get the placebo was close to her. In the finale, her deception is revealed and the shit hits the fan. This is because it is a randomised clinical trial; the doctors do not get to assign who gets the active therapy and who gets the placebo. This prevents them from, either intentionally or unintentionally, giving the active treatment to patients they believe are more likely to recover anyway and skewing the results (i.e. making the treatment look better than it really is). So Meredith tampering with who gets the treatment invalidates the whole trial. Now, even after she is informed of this and how now no one will get access to the new drug (due to the trial not being able to go ahead, so it can’t be demonstrated to be effective) she still says she would do it again because it was a person who meant so much to her.

This sort of attitude (which is not at all uncommon) really drives me up the wall; effectively Meredith, and others in similar situations, are giving a big middle finger to everyone else just to help someone they care about. It really shows how self-centred someone is that they can’t step back and realise that while they are trying to help someone they love, so is everyone else. In the case of Meredith, she wanted to help someone she loved, but at the same time prevented hundreds of others from helping their loved ones.

I also ran into a similar phenomenon during an ethics class in my undergrad course; we were given the following scenario and asked whether we thought the decision in it was moral (paraphrased from memory);

An earthquake occurs in China and buries a man’s family in rumble. In the process of digging them out, he discovers that across the road an important official and his family are buried. The man decides to stop trying to rescue his family and rescue the official and his family instead. He successfully rescues them, but his own family die in the process. When asked why he made the choice that he did, he said that by rescuing the official, he could go on to coordinate the rescue effort (by virtue of having extensive knowledge of the local area) and end up saving more people.

Now, as a utilitarian, I said that the action was moral because it could effectively save more lives (increasing the overall well-being). Now while the majority did say they while they would have saved their family had they been in the situation but respected the man for thinking of others (a position I don’t find unacceptable), a small minority believed that he had acted immorally and should have saved his family (invoking duty to family primarily). After some discussion back and forth, I presented them with a new hypothetical to try to demonstrate the point I was trying to make;

A serial killer has you locked in a chair. In front of you is your family in a cage, ten families you do not know in another. You are given the choice of who dies; either your family or the ten families. Which would you choose?

I thought that this scenario was entirely black and white; that only a monster would say that it was moral to choose their family. However, I was wrong. Not only did these individuals say they would choose their families, they were defending it as the moral choice. I mean, I could understand someone saying that they aren’t strong enough to do the right thing, but to actually believe that ten other families dying so yours can survive is moral is downright insane. Could these people not understand that each of those families had people who loved them just as much as they loved their families? What makes them think that their love for their family trumps everyone else’s?

A bit more of a rant than usual, but there it is.

Short and Sharp - Reformation of Child Molesters

This post is prompted by this story (and the comment section found within). For those of you who are too lazy to click on the link, the article basically tells of a man who was convicted of indecently assaulting a 16 year old boy in 2005, and now has won through VCAT a working with children certificate because VCAT believe he no longer poses a danger to children.

The thing that most interests me is the response to this situation; at the time of writing this, not a single one of the 32 comments on the article was even willing to accept the possibility that this man has rehabilitated and is not a threat; every comment either explicitly or implicitly says that a person who molests a child is incapable of rehabilitating.

Whether or not this case is an example of reformation of a child molester (I personally think it is off the limited information available), it seems clear that the majority of individuals believe that it is impossible for a person who has sexually assaulted a child to be rehabilitated. I’m not quite sure whether it is that they think rehabilitation is actually impossible or that the cost of wrongly assessing a person as rehabilitated is too high to ever bother attempting it (a kind of ‘think of the children’ argument).

What do my intelligent audience think? Is it possible for a child molester to ever be rehabilitated? If so, why? If not, why not?

Common Questions to Atheists

I found this list of questions on Lady Atheist's blog that atheists are often asked. While I don’t particularly have anything original to add, I think that it is worth answering as it will demonstrate my views on a wide variety of issues. 

Q:  Where do you go when you die?

A:  While I wouldn’t claim to know with certainty, my view is that, upon death, we will cease to exist. From the evidence I have come across, it appears the mind is a function of the brain; so without a working brain, you will have no mind and therefore cease to exist. 

Q:  Aren't you worried that you might be wrong and you might go to hell?

A:  Not at all. Hell was never something I believed in (even when I was a half-assed Christian). Do I think it is possible that I am wrong? Of course. I just don’t think the probability of me being wrong about the existence hell is high enough to worry about. Take for example the chance that I will be hit by a car tomorrow; this is a scenario which I view as quite likely to happen in comparison with Hell being real, yet I’m not worried about being hit by a car. 

Q:  How can you be moral without God?

A:  How can you be moral with God? That isn’t a snide reply, but a serious question. Are you moral with God because God has defined what is good or because God is intelligent and powerful enough to determine what is good? If it is the first one, I would argue that you aren’t moral in any meaningful sense of the word. If it is the second, then you have just answered the question yourself; we can also determine what is good. We may not be able to do it as well as God could (assuming he exists), but being he isn’t putting his two-cents in on relevant issues, we are left to do it ourselves. 

Q:  You're really just angry with God.

A:  Sometimes, but this is irrelevant to why I am an atheist. To be clear, it is possible to be angry at a being regardless of whether it exists or not. For example, I am often infuriated by the character of Nikki on Big Love, yet that doesn’t mean I think she really exists. I am angry at the portrayed actions of her character. This is similar to when I find aspect of God’s personality (as depicted by the Bible) to be immoral/anger-inducing. Again, this doesn’t mean I think God exists; just that I find the actions that are portrayed by his character to be immoral.

Q:  You're really just angry at the abuses of the Church.

A:  Again, while I may sometimes be angry at the actions of Christians, this is irrelevant to my atheism. It may inform the actions I choose to take (e.g. opposing the homophobia of Christians directly), but it isn’t why I don’t believe in god. 

Q:  The church has been responsible for great works of art.

A:  So? There is much art in other religions, so either their gods also exist or inspiration can come from any source, real or imaginary. 

Q:  How do you know the Bible isn't true?

A:  In the same way you know that the Koran, the Tao Te Ching or any other religious text isn’t true; lack of supporting evidence and logical inconsistencies. 

Q:  Isn't it arrogant to presume you're right and all those Christians are wrong?

A:  Why is it arrogant for me to presume I am right, yet it isn’t arrogant for Christians to presume they are right? But I fully admit I may be wrong, but I will only change my position when given a good argument and evidence that my position is wrong. 

Q:  You think you know everything, don't you?  (Also: You think you have all the answers!)

A:  No. Just no. 

Q:  Science can't answer everything.  What about love?

A:  I’m not advocating that it can. Though I do think science can explain love; interactions between memories, emotions and social situations that are governed by neurons and chemicals in our brains. 

Q:  How do you explain the human need to believe in God?  God made humans different from the animals.

A:  I think the ‘need’ (I use quotation marks because I don't think it is really a need) can be explained by a number of facts known about human psychology. Firstly, humans are pattern and agent seeking creatures; our minds are built for detecting patterns and, often, attributing those patterns to an animate agent. An example of this is the thought some people get that their computer intentionally crashes when they haven’t saved; they are detecting a pattern (computer crashing when they haven’t saved) and blaming their computer for it. Now, most of us would agree that this is both not a meaningful pattern (i.e. there isn’t actually a causative effect between the chance of your computer crashing and whether you have saved your work or not) or an intentional act on behalf of the computer. I think this is a similar phenomenon to how humans came to believe in god (mistakenly identifying patterns in nature and attributing them to an agent).

The second point I would bring up would be that this pattern seeking behaviour increases when we find ourselves in situations that are out of our control. There is a good, evolutionary reason for this; our ancestors found themselves frequently in situations that were out of their control such as attacks from predators. Now, increased pattern detection in such situations would aid in survival as these individuals could determine any activity they are engaged in that is affecting the attack rates of predators. For example, it could be noticed that if meat is left uncovered for too long, predators are more likely to attack. Thusly, this would lead to the covering of meat and decreased predator attacks as a consequence. This fact could also be used to explain another fact about our current world; the countries with the highest societal health (which is a good proxy for control over our situation) have the lowest levels of religious belief and vice versa. 

Q: What about the miracles of the Bible?

A: What about the miracles of the Koran? The Baghavada Gita? 

Q:  [insert seemingly miraculous prayer story here]. How do you explain that?

A:  I normal take a two pronged approach to such questions; firstly, unless it is an event that personally happened to individual telling me this story, the question of authenticity is one that is hard to answer. Secondly, I ask why there is the need to explain some fortunate event with references to the supernatural. An example I have had presented to me is one of a family had their unborn child diagnosed with a serious condition (unspecified as to which), the prayed and when the child was born, they had no problems whatsoever. The issue here is when you realise that most, if not all, medical tests have an error rate; that is, a percentage of test results are either false positives or false negatives. This is often quite small, but when applied to a large population size, is not an insignificant number. To demonstrate this, let’s say that the test in question had a .1% false positive rate; .1% of the time, the result indicated they had the condition tested for when they really didn’t. If this test is administered to all pregnant mothers (roughly 300,000 in 2010), then we can expect 300 false positives for 2010 alone. That is, 300 mothers will be told that their child has that condition, only to find at birth that they don’t. Not really miraculous at all. 

Q:  Christianity has been around for 2,000 years.  How could it survive if it were false?

A:  How has Hinduism survived for 4,000 years if it was false? 

Q:  There are millions of Christians.  They can't all be wrong.

A:  Yes, they can, just as the billions of Muslims and Hindus can be wrong.

Q:  Nothing can exist without a creator, so the fact that things exist proves there's a God.

A:  If nothing can exist without a creator, then neither can God. If things can exist without a creator, who is to say that the cosmos isn’t one of those things? 

Q:  You can't prove that God doesn't exist.

A:  And you can’t prove Santa Claus doesn’t exist too. I am not an atheist because I think God has been proven not to exist, but because there is no evidence to prove that he does. 

Q:  If you're an atheist doesn't that mean that you don't believe in anything?

A:  I believe in things that have evidence that prove that they exist. 

 Q:  If you don't believe in God, that means you want to be God.

A:  Depends what you mean by that statement; if you mean I want humans to fulfil all the functions that have normally been attributed to God (morality, purpose etc.), then yes. If you mean I want to be a dictator in the sky, then no. 

Q:  You just left the Church because you want to sin.

A:  I was never really in any church. 

Q:  So then your life has no meaning?

A:  Yes and no. I do not believe life has any inherit meaning. But that is different from saying it has no meaning. Life has the meaning that I (and all of us) choose to give it.

Short and Sharp - Conformity

A thing that really bugs me is when people get all snooty when it comes to conformity; that if anyone does what the mainstream does, they are just a mindless sheep. Now, I won’t dispute that there are people who legitimately participate in activities they hate just because the majority it. But I believe these individuals to be a minority; most people who make are the mainstream are simply prioritizing their desires.

Let me explain further; in life, we have to prioritize our desires because it is impossible for us to undertake them all concurrent. Desires can mutually exclusive (i.e. wanting the security of a stable partner and wanting to experience the thrill of getting to know someone new) where as others are just temporally exclusive (i.e. they can’t be undertaken at the concurrently because they take up too much time and resources). We have to order our desires and select which are most likely to make us happy and which are most practical.

Conformity comes into this when you realise it too is a desire; the desire to be a part of the group. Take the following example:

Person A’s desires (ranked by preference):

1. Person A wants to be a porn-star.
2. Person A wants to be a nurse.
3. Person A wants to conform to a group.

Now a lot of people would say that they should just go with their most powerful desire to become a porn-star and, if they chose nursing instead, would criticize them for conforming to what society wants. But what they fail to realise is that, by becoming a nurse, they are fulfilling two lesser desires, which may be greater than their first one.

My point is simply this; don’t criticize the choice a person makes just because it happens to align with what mainstream society does. The desire to conform is no more rational than any other emotional desire (to be loved, to feel happy etc.).

Short and Sharp - Basic Beliefs

In the essay ‘Is Belief in God Properly Basic?’ Alvin Plantinga argues that belief in God does not require evidential proof, as it is a properly basic belief (1). By this, he means it is a belief that cannot be based on any other belief. Another example of a basic belief is our memory; the belief that I have a memory cannot be based on any other belief; it is properly basic. Plantinga contends that belief in God is the same.

It should be noted that I agree with Plantinga’s foundationalism approach to epistemology; in that, I think that every belief we have can be boiled down to basic beliefs, which are self-evident and therefore do not require proof. For me, these basic beliefs are our senses, emotions, thoughts and memory (henceforth referred to as experiences). This is different from saying that our beliefs about our experience are properly basic; just that the experiences themselves are properly basic. This is known as basic empiricism and is discussed by Richard Carrier in his book ‘Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defence of Metaphysical Naturalism’ (2) or in this web article (3).

This is an important distinction to make as I believe this is primarily where Plantinga’s argument for God as a properly basic belief fails. There is a difference between experience and our interpretation of experience. Think acknowledging that you are having an experience compared to what that experience actually means. The first is undisputable; the second is quite easily disputable. To show the difference further, here are the examples that Plantinga uses to demonstrate basic beliefs:

1. I see a tree.
2. I had breakfast this morning.
3. That person is angry.

The problem is that none of these are basic beliefs; they are interpretations of experiences and, therefore, can be wrong. The tree could be a realistic fake; you could have dreamed you had breakfast this morning and mistaken it for reality; you could not understand how that person displays anger. If you construct a foundationalist epistemology that is based off incorrect basic beliefs, you’re going to be wrong a lot of the time (even by the standards of your own epistemology). 

References

1. Cottingham J. Western Philosophy: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Pub.; 2008. (Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies).

2. Carrier R. Sense & Goodness Without God: A Defence of Metaphysical Naturalism. Bloomington, Indiana: AuthorHouse; 2005.

3.  Carrier R. Defending Naturalism as a Worldview: A Rebuttal to Michael Rea's World Without Design; 2003 [27/03/2011]; Available from: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/rea.html.

Biological Immortality

In the February 2^nd, 2010 Deakin Philosophical Society meeting, we discussed the idea that humans may one day no longer age (after watching a TED lecture on the subject by Aubrey de Grey, which can be found here). In the discussion the followed, there seemed to be a disagreement which, in my opinion, hinged on a fundamental misunderstanding on how each party in the discussion was defining the term ‘immortal’; one side (my side, for those of you playing at home) was using a more biological definition of immortality, the other was using what might be the more colloquial sense of the word (namely, never having to die).

My take on the word immortal (at least, my usage of in during this debate) was more in line with biological immortality. The basic, one sentence summary of this concept would be where the death rate of an organism is not affected by the age of the organism. With humans (and animals in general), once adulthood is reached, the probability of an individual dying in the following year increases (that is, the older you are, the more likely you are to die). This graph from the Australian Bureau of Statistics illustrates the idea nicely:

Biological immortality would be represented in a graph like this:

That is, once adulthood was reached, the death rate would remain static (more or less). This is not to say people would not die, just that there would be no correlation between age and death rate. There would still be a correlation between life style choices and death rate (i.e. if you drink and drive, you’d have a higher probability of dying than someone who didn’t drink drive).

In using ‘immortal’ in this sense, I believe it is perfectly acceptable to say that humans will one day become immortal.

It should be noted that there may still be an indirect correlation between age and death rate in a biologically immortal race; it is possible that life would become mind-numbingly boring after many hundreds or thousands of years. Thus, the older people get in a biologically immortal society, the more likely they are to choose death.